Edson’s next call
was to former Garden employee and famous designer in his own right, Greg
Marshall. I had met Marshall at his design studio outside Victoria, British
Columbia, in the course of one of several visits to LaConner as the 85
project matured from a calm, collected beginning in December 2000 to a
frantic, round-the-clock finale in October 2003. Having flown up to Victoria
from LaConner in a small Cessna with Edson in the morning, I had all day
to talk with Marshall and his employees and figure out precisely how their
drawings would inspire both the exterior lines and the interior layout
of the 85. Again the reasons were simple. Marshall had state-of-the-art
electric modeling capability, a creative staff, and offered one other
significant advantage: He was open to suggestion. Some designers would
have declared it absolutely impossible to create a finely balanced, sweet-running
big sister to the 65 that featured four en suite-head-equipped staterooms
(master aft, VIP forward, plus guests port and starboard) forward of the
engine room and two more staterooms and a lounge aft for crew. But not
Marshall. He sensed challenge and laid in extra stores of midnight oil.

Edson pulled a bunch
of subcontractors into the mix as soon as Garden and Marshall had done
their darndest. Thanks to virtual models transmitted via 3D modeling software,
the five-axis mills of Janiki Industries in Sedro-Woolley, Washington,
soon began work on plugs for bow and stern sections of the hull. Mixing
old technology with new in what he admits was the ultimately unrealized
hope of saving money, Edson also hired Townsend Bay Marine of nearby Port
Townsend, Washington, to loft and fair by hand the part of the hull plug
that would fit between Janiki’s computer-milled bow and stern sections.

The dust began flying
at Townsend Bay as soon as the parts came from Janiki. Courtesy of stacks
of MDF (medium-density fiberboard), a two-story, dinosaur-like skeleton
of frames, an array of three-man fairing boards, numerous five-gallon
pails of fairing compound, an old-fashioned water level, and an assortment
of plumb bobs, the midsection began taking shape. Then finally it was
fitted and faired into the inboard ends of the Janiki parts and used to
create a complete hull mold, which was then stabilized in a cradle of
crisscrossed steel supports and installed in Edson’s big white tent.

Janiki did the deck
mold solo. Because Edson’s philosophy for the 85 specified a solid
one-piece deck molding that would include virtually everything forward
of the swim platform and above the hull sides—i.e., cockpit, superstructure,
side decks, and bulwarks—the deck plug and the mold made from it
were incredibly, almost scarily, complex. And while Janiki’s engineers
ran computer checks for areas of “negative draft” that would
preclude pulling the part from the finished mold, Edson once told me the
anxiety he felt while overseeing the first iteration of the process in
his freshly minted lamination shop was considerable. “There was a
pucker factor to it,” he admitted, “No doubt.”